By now anyone reading this knows that Lena Dunham is the voice of her generation, part Shakespeare, part Nora Ephron, offering self-aware, penetrating insights into the human condition — or, should I say, the twenty-something Brooklynite condition — via her HBO show, Girls, and anyone who disagrees is just a HATER or completely delusional. That said, as Drew Magary notes, Lena Dunham season is upon us, so each week we here at UPROXX will present our five favorite quotes from the previous night’s show completely out of context. You’re quite welcome.

So let’s get right to it and find out what sort of mind-bending things Hannah, Marnie, Ray, David Mamet’s daughter, that rape-y hipster dude, etc. said this week, shall we?

5. “Did Caroline leave on her own or was she kicked out for stealing a light fixture or something?”

4. “You can wipe your nose with some toilet paper and you can f*cking get lost.”

I rarely find myself getting extremely irritated at “Girls” but I was last night. It was the most hipstery-hipster crap that ever hipstered. I hated it. And normally I kind of like the show. Last night’s episode just made me furious.

The reviews/recaps surrounding Girls is becoming pretty childish at this point. If you don’t like it, then leave it to someone else to actually do an objective recap. The pretentious hate on Girls is just as bad as the pretentious aspects on the show. But I agree last night’s episode was pretty meh besides Ray’s parts. Could have done a better job of introducing Gaby Hoffmann’ s character.

It’s not pretentious to hate poor writing that is trying to pass itself off as deeply intellectual for the millennial set. Lena is just a better connected less-willing-to-piss-off-authority Diablo Cody.
Say what you will about Diablo but at least she is capable about creating a fully fleshed out character that isn’t based on herself or played by her. Seriously, every character that isn’t Hannah feels like a central casting notice.

I don’t know. It felt kinda of stagnant to me, punctuated by moments of craziness, like Ray getting punched, or Adam’s sister hurting herself. This scenes with Ray were great. Him finding out about his boss/mentor had cancer (or some other serious illness), to getting really pissed at the DJ for changing the song, to the small talk with Shoshana which just failed miserably. But the episode didn’t really have a good flow to me, and the transitions were kind of sloppy.

The thing is, to me one of the defining characteristics of the show is how loose and sloppy it is at times. It feels like they’re just kind of winging it. I love that about it, but I can see how that could turn people off.

And I’ll definitely admit that kind of way of running a show means their ambitions exceed their grasp at times.

I just don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to stomach Marnie. It’s too unrelentingly awkward. Not that that’s an indictment of the show, but it starts to grate on my soul like more than two episodes in a row of Curb or the UK Office.

I enjoy that when the show started I hated Ray and thought Marnie was the only reasonable one, and over the course of the three seasons that’s completely helixed.

It’s not only the low ratings either, it’s low ratings on a network where ratings typically don’t matter. HBO isn’t CBS where any and everything gets good ratings and the shows are generic and generally indistinguishable from one another. HBO is a premium cable station with a higher price for those with discerning taste. Coincidentally, the HBO shows that we remember the network for get good ratings:

The Sopranos
Real Time with Bill Maher
Game of Thrones (BLOCKBUSTER ratings)
Band of Brothers

Even The Wire which only got middling ratings never dipped below 1M, whereas the Girls season finale last year got 632K, the season premiere this year got 1.1M which is a good number but True Detective got 2.2M.

Boardwalk Empire is going away but it’s season finale also drew 2.2M viewers, Newsroom drew 1.5M yet it’s going away next year. Yes, yes, I know that live ratings aren’t everything but generally speaking the shows with buzz (including True Blood) on HBO get good ratings. I don’t know what the Girls DVD sales are like, and allegedly HBO claims that it does well on HBOGo but there’s still dismal live viewership on a network where live viewership is typically a good barometer.

The Wire, which we all know and love, wasn’t that popular during its broadcast. DVD culture is what made it so popular, but even then they peaked at about 4M viewers and never dipped below 1M. There was a rapper that said it’s like Drake. The fact that so many of its fans are female tends to turn up the volume and overstate its appeal. Perhaps thats it.